Richard Spencer is one of the Daily Telegraph's Middle East correspondents. Married with three children, he was previously news editor, and then China correspondent for six years. He is based in Cairo.

The Israelites and the Ishmaelites, part II

When I am at my most pompous and defensive about the virtues of a free media, even when a newspaper is being irresponsible or otherwise crap, I tend to talk about the dangers of an unexamined discourse. Put more simply, when certain issues can't be debated freely, ordinary and decent people can start to first accept, then use, and finally promulgate a rhetoric which in their heart of hearts they don't believe.

That's an optimistic view of the terrible things that – as we all know – ordinary and decent people can say and do, if the circumstances are right. You need optimism in the Middle East, where this sort of rhetoric is only too common.

At least, I ascribe to this eternal verity a paragraph I came across in last week's Economist – my copy arrived late, which is why I've only just read it. It came from an interview with the local boss of Fatah in the West Bank city of Jenin – Fatah, if you remember, are supposed to be the moderate, pro-Western Palestinians. Ata Abu Rumeila, the boss, seems a decent enough fellow, too.

In this city that Mr Blair (as representative of the Middle East Quartet) hails as the model of a future Palestinian state, people are still disenchanted. When the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, shot four settlers dead on the eve of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Washington, even policemen and local chiefs cheered. "Our grassroots were even more thrilled than Hamas's," says Ata Abu Rumeila.

Those four settlers, I remind you, were two civilian men and two women, one of them pregnant. Now as I say I am naïve and I am also aware of the extraordinary bitterness and anger of many if not most Palestinians about their situation. There is also a propensity in all of us to feel a sneaking delight in the troubles of our enemies. But of all the Palestinians and, more widely, Arabs I know, whatever their hatred of Israel, how many of them would, in their heart of hearts, rejoice at murder?

In my previous job in China, I often felt that, particularly when it came to the strange nexus between nationalism, patriotism, and the Communist Party, many people I met and knew could maintain two entirely separate rhetorical narratives at the same time – the Party certainly does, as can be seen by its on-off spats with Japan. You would meet young, intelligent, westernised people – especially those, in fact – who could talk blithely of the need to invade Taiwan, immediately, as if the possibility of conflagration meant nothing to them but who, you felt, when the mood or topic of conversation changed would be violently hostile to any attempt by the Party actually to do so.

Those who like to psychoanalyse these things more than I do suggest that it was the mental stress of maintaining contradictory and violent mental narratives that caused the massive psychological fracture of the Cultural Revolution. But it does not take totalitarianism for the rhetoric to carry us away. Maybe we can all, reflexively, cheer something we know to be terrible: like when we laugh at some terrible, violent ending in a movie which allows the hero to escape the carnage.

At least, I hope that is how, and only how, the people of Jenin were thrilled at the cold-blooded gunning down of a pregnant woman. Otherwise we are all doomed, and damned.